Kenneth Tynan - Wikiquote Kenneth Tynan Jump to: navigation , search No theater could sanely flourish until there was an umbilical connection between what was happening on the stage and what was happening in the world . Kenneth Tynan ( 2 April 1927 – 26 July 1980 ) was a British author most famous for his theatre criticism. Contents Quotes[ edit ] We shall be judged by what we do, not by how we felt while we were doing it. How far should one accept the rules of the society in which one lives? To put it another way: at what point does conformity become corruption ? Only by answering such questions does the conscience truly define itself. A good many inconveniences attend playgoing in any large city, but the greatest of them is usually the play itself. Article in the New York Herald Tribune (17 February 1957) I believe in neither a director’s nor a writer’s theatre, but a theatre of intelligent audiences. I count myself as a member of an intelligent audience, and I wrote to you as such.

That you should disagree with me I can understand, but that you should resent my expressing my opinions is something that frankly amazes me. I thought we had outgrown the idea of theatre as a mystic rite born of secret communion between author, director, actors and an empty auditorium. Letter to George Devine (10 March 1964), printed in Kenneth Tynan : A Life by Dominic Shellard [Yale University Press, 2003, ISBN 0-300-09919-3 ], p. 292 I doubt if there are very many rational people in this world to whom the word "fuck" is particularly diabolical or revolting or totally forbidden. Spoken during a discussion on censorship, broadcast live on the BBC program BBC-3, (13 November 1965) Tynan was the first to say this word on British television, leading to an apology from the BBC and several motions in the House of Commons. Any country that has sexual censorship will eventually have political censorship.

As quoted in "Critic Kenneth Tynan Has Mellowed But Is Still England's Stingingest Gadfly" by Godfrey Smith in The New York Times (9 January 1966) I hope I never need to believe in God . It would be an awful confession of failure . As quoted in "Critic Kenneth Tynan Has Mellowed But Is Still England's Stingingest Gadfly" by Godfrey Smith in The New York Times (9 January 1966) A critic is a man who knows the way but can't drive the car. As quoted in "Critic Kenneth Tynan Has Mellowed But Is Still England's Stingingest Gadfly" by Godfrey Smith in The New York Times (9 January 1966) No theater could sanely flourish until there was an umbilical connection between what was happening on the stage and what was happening in the world.

As quoted in "Critic Kenneth Tynan Has Mellowed But Is Still England's Stingingest Gadfly" by Godfrey Smith in The New York Times (9 January 1966) Not content to have the audience in the palm of his hand, he goes one further and clinches his fist. As quoted in "Kenneth Tynan — The Critic As Elegant Conversationalist" by by Robert Cushman in The New York Times (17 August 1980) A neurosis is a secret that you don't know you're keeping. Quoted in Kathleen Tynan , The Life of Kenneth Tynan (1987), p. 188 Tynan Right and Left (1967)[ edit ] A good drama critic is one who perceives what is happening in the theatre of his time . A great drama critic also perceives what is not happening. The man who reacts to the universe with a cry of impotent anguish is acceptable as an artist only if he can persuade us that he has sanely considered the other possible reactions and found them inadequate. A good drama critic is one who perceives what is happening in the theatre of his time .

A great drama critic also perceives what is not happening. Foreword, p. viii John Osborne spoke out in a vein of ebullient, free-wheeling rancour that betokened the arrival of something new in the theatre — a sophisticated, articulate lower-class. Most of the critics were offended by Jimmy Porter , but not on account of his anger; a working-class hero is expected to be angry. What nettled them was something quite different: his self-confidence. This was no envious inferior whose insecurity they could pity. "Decade in Retrospect: 1959" (1959), p. 13 When you've seen all of Ionesco 's plays, I felt at the end, you've seen one of them. Review of Victims of Duty by Eugène Ionesco (1960), p. 36 A villain who shares one's guilt is inevitably more attractive than a hero convinced of one's innocence . Review of The Changeling, by Thomas Middleton (1961), p. 75 We shall be judged by what we do, not by how we felt while we were doing it.

Review of Altona, by Jean-Paul Sartre (1961), p. 97 The man who reacts to the universe with a cry of impotent anguish is acceptable as an artist only if he can persuade us that he has sanely considered the other possible reactions and found them inadequate. "Anatomy of the Absurd" (1962), p. 104 How far should one accept the rules of the society in which one lives? To put it another way: at what point does conformity become corruption? Only by answering such questions does the conscience truly define itself. Review of Le Misanthrope, by Molière , at the Piccadilly (1962), p. 117 When a society has doubts about its future , it tends to produce spokesmen whose main appeal is to the emotions, who argue from intuitions, and whose claim to be truth-bearers rests solely on intense personal feeling. Review of After the Fall, by Arthur Miller , at the ANTA Washington Square Theatre, New York; Blues for Mister Charlie, by James Baldwin at the ANTA Theatre, New York (1962), p.

143 I attacked those Western playwrights who use their influence and affluence to preach to the world the nihilistic doctrine that life is pointless and irrationally destructive, and that there is nothing we can do about it. Until everyone is fed, clothed, housed and taught, until human beings have equal leisure to contemplate the overwhelming fact of mortality, we should not (I argued) indulge in the luxury of "privileged despair ." "Conference at Edinburgh" (1963), p. 146 Does the critic wish to influence the kind of film that costs more than £250,000? It is as if he were to send a postcard to General Motors explaining that he would like them to make a raft next year, or a helicopter, instead of a car. "Footnote on Cinema" (undated), p. 260 Everyone is vulnerable who is at once gifted and gregarious. " Orson Welles " (1961), p.

297 Judge and prosecutor had hammered it home that Lady Chatterly was an immoral woman, that she had had sexual relations before marriage, that she had committed adultery under her husband's roof; as if these charges somehow disqualified her from participation in serious literature. Indeed, there were long periods of the trial during which an outsider might well have assumed that a divorce case was being heard. "Lady Chatterly's Trial (The Old Bailey, 20 October - 2 November 1960)", p. 409 The buttocks are the most aesthetically pleasing part of the body because they are non-functional. Although they conceal an essential orifice, these pointless globes are as near as the human form can ever come to abstract art. "Meditations on Basic Baroque," IV (1966), p. 432 Harper/Collins, ISBN 0-06-096557-6 One would have thought that the notion of an impersonal critic was as patently absurd as that of an impersonal person: yet playwrights still cherish it as a sort of holy ideal. Admittedly, we all make mystiques: but this one is particularly wishful.

The man who asks for an anonymous, impersonal criticism is trying to elevate criticism to the status of a science; whereas it is, I am afraid, only an art. The critic's business is to write readable English: the playwright's to write speakable English. Beyond that it is every man for himself. " George Jean Nathan " (1953), p. 61 Welles is at once as abnormal and as natural as Niagara Falls. (p. 65) "Orson Welles" (1953), p. 65 What, when drunk, one sees in other women, one sees in Garbo sober. (p. 79) " Greta Garbo " (1954), p. 79 All writing is an antisocial act, since the writer is a man who can speak freely only when alone; to be himself he must lock himself up, to communicate he must cut himself off from all communication; and in this there is something always a little mad. " Tennessee Williams " (1956), p. 97 In most writers, style is a welcome, an invitation, a letting down of the drawbridge between the artist and the world. Shaw had no time for such ruses.

Unlike most of his countrymen, he abominated charm, which he regarded as evidence of chronic temperamental weakness. " Bernard Shaw " (1956), p. 102 His puritan, muscular, moor-tramping soul (superbly mirrored in Higgins's hymn to the intellect in Pygmalion ) bred in him a loathing of all things, whether poems or gadgets, that were designed to comfort the human condition without actively trying to improve it. (p. 103) "Bernard Shaw," p. 103 Every speech, for Olivier, is like a mass of marble at which the sculptor chips away until its essential form and meaning are revealed. No matter how ignoble the character he plays, the result is always noble as a work of art. " Laurence Olivier " (1966), p. 208 Her style looks absurdly simple — an effortless act of projection, a serpentine lasso whereby her voice casually winds itself around our most vulnerable fantasies. But it is not easy. It is what remains when ingratiation, sentimentality and the manifold devices of heart-warming crap have been ruthlessly pared away. Steel and silk are left, shining and durable.

" Marlene Dietrich " (1967), p. 215 She shows herself to the audience like the Host to the congregation. "Marlene Dietrich," p. 217 Misattributed[ edit ] Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding. Critic Kenneth Tynan Has Mellowed But Is Still England's Stingingest Gadfly Critic Kenneth Tynan Has Mellowed But Is Still England's Stingingest Gadfly By GODFREY SMITH e looks pretty mild these days. The bony structure of his face, once spectacularly hollow, had been fleshed out by years of good eating, his flaxen hair is now neatly trimmed and he affects a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles which make him look like an Ibsen school master. I'd never noticed before that it is possible to warm his six-room apartment in Mount Street, London, with an open fire; but on this dreary winter evening logs burned in the grate. Kenneth Tynan said it had been a very calm two weeks.

He had received only 40 letters since he jolted viewers watching the B.B.C.'s late-night satirical program, "B.B.C. 3," by using, in a discussion on censorship, the four-letter Anglo-Saxon word for the act of love. Tynan said most of the mail supported him and came from married women; those against him were mainly married men, some of whom seemed to evince severe symptoms of sexual stress themselves. The letter which pleased him most was from a Scottish grandmother: "Dear Mr. Tynan: How wonderful it was to hear that sweet word on television." Not everybody took it so well. Three groups of M.P.'s introduced motions of condemnation in the House of Commons; Sir Hugh Carleton Greene, director-general of the B.B.C., was called on to resign. Some sense of proportion was restored only when Emrys Hughes--rightly renowned as the House's jester--offered an amendment saying that Carleton Greene should not go unless every member of Her Majesty's forces who had used the word in the last five years was discharged, too. Tynan's function as a critic has been to shock, to outrage, to stimulate. The tendency was evident early.

At King Edward VI School in Birmingham, the headmaster tried to interest the boys in civics by holding a mock election. Tynan, then 15 years old, was to be the Independent candidate and his manifesto, pinned to the school bulletin board, advocated the repeal of the laws governing homosexuality and abortion. The headmaster said that Tynan must withdraw the manifesto. Tynan held a protest meeting in the lavatories. The head sent for him and asked him to withdraw from the election. Tynan handed in his resignation and that of the three other candidates. Tynan was born in Birmingham, on April 2, 1927, the illegitimate son of a minor store tycoon and a Lancashire girl of Irish parentage whose surname was Tynan. His father, Sir Peter Peacock, had begun as a 5-shilling-a-week office boy, his mother's family had been in domestic service. They met at a whist party in the Lancashire town of Warrington, where the father was mayor, and moved to Birmingham to avoid scandal. Sir Peter was 55 when Tynan was born, and died, in 1948, aged 76.

He wore a frock coat, voted Liberal, was a strong Methodist and a devout patriot. He had no interest in the theater. "We got on not badly but not closely," Tynan remembers. "He wanted me to be a lawyer, so he was pleased when I was successful in school debating societies." Sir Peter left ?120,000 to his legal wife and other dependents; some shares and his house to Tynan's mother, who died four years ago. It was his mother who first took Tynan to the theater and it quickly enslaved him. He saw Donald Wolfit in "Macbeth" in 1937--"and was scared to death for days after." He went to see "Hamlet" at Strafford in 1943. "I'd been very excited by this performance, but nobody would know exactly how good or bad it had been unless I wrote it down. I wanted to give a permanent form to something evanescent." He felt sure he could review it better than anybody else. That, a local actor told him, was all very well, but could he review it in an hour flat, as professional critics must?

Tynan put a watch in front of him and wrote the review inside the time. Soon his apprentice work had engaged the attention of James Agate, then the magisterial critic of The Sunday Times of London, who printed extracts from their correspondence in his autobiographical volumes, "Ego Eight" and "Ego Nine." Tynan's verdict on "Othello," with Frederick Valk as the Moor and Wolfit as Iago ("I have seen a public event of enormous constellated magnitude and radiance") drew from Agate the comment: "Anybody reading this in 100 years time should know what these two actors had been like in these two roles. In other words, here is a great dramatic critic in the making." Tynan invited Agate down to Birmingham. In the taxi from the station Agate, wearing his sporty hat and carrying his usual silver-knobbed cane, placed his hand on Tynan's knee. "Are you a homosexual, my boy?" he asked. "I'm afraid not," said Tynan. "Ah, well," said Agate, "I thought we'd get that out of the way first." Agate could be forgiven his misapprehension.

When Tynan went up to Oxford in October, 1945, he habitually wore a purple doeskin suit with a gold satin shirt. He was woefully emaciated, just over six feet tall, and his wild thatch of hair looked as if it had been used to pack bottles of champagne. He was burned in effigy by a gang of football thugs and only escaped debugging by sinking to the ground with the histrionic cry of "Christ, my hip, it's gone again!"--at which the naive hearties carried him tenderly back to his room. His university contemporaries were Kingsley, Amis, John Wain, Edward Boyle and Anthony Wedgwood Benn. But this was indisputably Tynan's Oxford. When he spoke in the Union Society it was packed as only one other undergraduate, Hillaire Belloc, had ever filled it. He ended one speech on a comma. Another night he persuaded the whole house to leap to its feet and cry, "I am big and strong and powerful." He was equally comic as a cabaret turn and his celebrated impersonation of the ballet dancer, Sir Robert Helpman, caused his undergraduate audience to fall out of their seats.

Later, he was auditioned for the Windmill Theater but turned down because, said Vivian Van Damm, his act was too queer. This, despite his outr� appearance, Tynan categorically is not. "The most perverted thing about him," a contemporary remarked, "is that he is quite normal." No, not normal. He was a marvelous boy: when he left Oxford in 1948 he had been president of the Experimental Theater Club, editor of the student magazine Cherwell and secretary of the Union. He had produced five plays, acted in half a dozen more, and played Fear in the "Masque of Hope," presented for Princess Elizabeth. He had also thrown parties for the Old Vic company, the cast of "Anna Lucasta" and Gertrude Lawrence, and one marking his 21st birthday for 200 guests on a Thames pleasure steamer. To his great regret, he just failed to get a first-class degree in English, but fell under the spell of the late C.S. Lewis, who taught him and whose memory he still reveres.

The greatest single influence on his life, though, has been Orson Welles: "my Big Daddy figure." In 1950 Tynan's first book, "He That Plays the King": a group of his essays on the theater, was published with a foreword by Wells ("Pray accept an old fellow's thanks") and a disarming author's preface: "I should like to apologize in advance for a note of smugness, even of insolence .... My only excuse is that of Winifred in Webster's play, 'May it please the court, I am but a young thing, and was drawn arnic-varsic into the business.'" Alec Guinness read the book and subsequently dreamed that he had seen Tynan playing the Player King in "Hamlet." He was then producing the play for the Festival of Britain and invited Tynan to take the part. Tynan was not keen. "The Player King," he protested, "should be a middle-aged man with a voice of brass. I'm as skinny as a willow and have a voice of tin." In the end Guinness talked him into it. The first night was a fiasco.

The electricians got four or five cues behind so that the ghost scene was played in blinding light. Somebody had hit on the abysmal notion of kitting the Player King out with a plastic fluorescent ear into which the poison was to be poured. "I felt like Van Gogh," Tynan recalls. "People kept saying, For God's sake, be careful with the ear!" The critics massacred it. Beverley Baxter in The Evening Standard concluded that the Player King was about as good as a village actor. Tynan, in a masterly letter to the editor, conceded that it had not been a great performance, but claimed that it was not at church-hall level: "I neither waved to my friends in the audience nor walked through the scenery." Within weeks after this exchange Tynan was dramatic critic of The Evening Standard. He stayed two years and wrote some of the most iridescent but destructive dramatic criticism ever penned. Of Anna Neagle in "The Glorious Days," for example, he said that she shook her voice at the audience "like a tiny fist." In the spring of 1954, when Tynan was 27, David Astor invited him to become dramatic critic of The Observer.

This put Tynan at the top of his profession. But what, I asked him at the time, was he going to do for the next 50 years? "I don't know," he replied, "what happens to b-boy critics." One of the good things that can happen is an invitation from The New Yorker; Tynan joined it in 1958 and stayed for two theater seasons. At any social gathering where theater people were present, Richard Watts of The New York Post recalls, "there was a sure way for a lonely guest to attract attention. All he had to do was to say loudly, 'Kenneth Tynan' and excited men and women would start arguing violently." Though Tynan could be brutal to mediocrity, he persuaded the Critics' Circle to make "Raisin in the Sun" the prize play of the season, and played a key part in making a success of "The Connection." And he made enemies. Producer David Merrick threatened to ban him from his theaters and an irate actress sent him a note: "Dear Ken: Go home and go to hell. Or go to hell, which is your home." He was also in political trouble.

In May, 1960, he was subpoenaed by the Senate Internal Security subcommittee and questioned about his views on Cuba and other matters. "The first secret interrogation," he said later, "which lasted one hour and a quarter, is usually a kind of audition. Then if they think the witness is worth it, they have a public session to which the press is invited. In my case, although Senator Dodd from Connecticut was clearly convinced that I was a Communist agent, they didn't bother to take it any further." This political involvement springs from Tynan's conviction that drama is a branch of sociology. "Ten years ago," he wrote in 1960, "I was in love with the theater of fantasy and shock.... I suspected that all really first-rate drama was about great men and dying and mourning; beyond that nothing.... For me, in short, drama was apart from life instead of a part of it." In the decade he underwent his apocalypse: "I became aware that art, ethics, politics and economics were inseparable...that no theater could sanely happen until there was an umbilical connection between what was happening on the stage and what was happening in the world." This is still his position.

"I came to politics through art," he says. "Instead of having it drummed into me in childhood, I came to it through the plays of Bertolt Brecht. I was the perfect audience for him. I am probably the only convert he ever made." Tynan has traveled widely behind the Iron Curtain, admires much of the theater in satellite countries but has never, pace Senator Dodd, been a Communist. "I am a believer in noncoercive Socialism; above all, that we must have a sexual revolution with a political revolution. In Russia you have a political revolution with a Victorian family hierarchy imposed on it. In America, on the other hand, people like Norman Mailer see no hope of a political revolution and therefore pin their hopes on a sexual revolution." Tynan's central thesis is that all forms of sexual behavior between consenting adults should be legal and morally neutral: "Any country that has sexual censorship will eventually have political censorship." This, indeed, was what he was saying in "B.B.C. 3," though the gist of his case was drowned in the uproar over the word. Though Tynan feels passionately, he does not try to promulgate his views through a formal cabal.

"The only thing is that I couldn't be friendly with a convinced Tory. Only recently someone pointed out to me that I hadn't had one in my house in two years. It would be like trying to establish contact with some rare plumed bird. All the people I know and like are Liberal or Socialist." He freely admits to being a talent snob. "I do get bored with charming people, even with witty people who don't do anything. I'm not interested unless I can talk to a friend about what he did last week." His close circle includes Gore Vidal, Mike Nichols, George Melly, Jonathan Miller, Christopher Logue and Marlene Dietrich. There is another group of friends with whom he is not so close but with whom he maintains a respectful, wary dialogue: "I trust John Osborne totally and I've never had a quarrel with him; but we have never been close." Sir Laurence Olivier, claims Tynan, is a forest animal: "He has given me a book for Christmas called 'African Genesis,' by Robert Ardrey, which he says has influenced him most. It's about a recent anthropological theory that man was the first armed and predatory ape. The basic human impulse is to carry arms and seize territory.

Larry has a very fatalist view of life. He is king of the jungle. He's like a big lion in a cage. You can put him through the hoop but every now and then a great paw will lash out." Still the association prospers. In August 1963, he joined Olivier at the long-gestated National Theater--Olivier is the director with the title of literary manager: "I am playing Boswell to Larry's Johnson. He corresponds to the German Dramaturge or French archiviste. "It is a combination of jobs. First it is to select the plays for the repertoire. I search for neglected old plays, commission plays, get translations made, work with authors on new plays and translations. I look after all the publications and literary side of the theater's activities. I write reams on productions, histories, programs. I act as the theater's spokesman, do interviews for TV and radio, travel about the world making speeches acting as ambassador almost. I've been from Detroit to Italy making speeches.

I'm also a resident early-warning system as critic of productions when they are in rehearsal." He plans a history of the National Theater up to 1970--when the company hopes to occupy at last its new site on the South Bank. "I like the job enormously. One gets to develop a terribly tempting taste even for the minor corridors of power. "I try to keep an eye on the hour hand while the others watch the minute hand. Someone must be above the tumult. I am there to find out what we ought to be doing in 18 months' time. I am the crow's nest department." Among his plans is a Feydeau farce, "A Flea In Her Curl": "I realize that we've done no French plays and that a little exercise in Gallic acting would be good for us. It will require rude health and gymnastic ability. To choose it I read about 30 Feydeau plays. I had a literal translation made and Larry was mad about it.

John Mortimer agreed to translate it and Jacques Chafon of the Com�die Francaise will direct." Tynan's function, he says, is "to find the unexpected and match it with contemporary talents." For example, he has unearthed a "dark, black, heretical play of Lope de Vega," which he read about in an American academic quarterly and which, to his surprise and pleasure, Osborne has agreed to adapt from the virtually unplayable original text. The only entirely new play commissioned by the National Theater so far is Peter Shaffer's "Black Comedy." "We were looking for a play to make a double bill with Strindberg's 'Miss Julie.' At a purely social lunch Shaffer told me he's had an idea in the taxi--based on that marvelous sketch in the Chinese theater where two men fight in the dark. Why not write a play based on the simple equation that dark equals light? We announced it and sold tickets without having a word written. Only a National Theater could have done that." Tynan believes that whole areas of European drama have been lost through bad translation and that we are only just beginning to appreciate the interpretive power of scholars and critics beyond the Berlin Wall.

He is hoping that the National Theater's next Shakespearean production will be in collaboration with the Czech scholar, Jan Kott, whose book "Shakespear, Our Contemporary" inspired Peter Hall's production of "Hamlet." He has commissioned Joseph Swoboda, the Czech stage designer for the National Theater's production of Buchner's "Danton's Death" because he believes him to stand in relation to his art as Frank Lloyd Wright to architecture: "Swoboda is an engineer, an architect and colorist. There is no designer in England to compare with him." Tynan's passion for the National Theater is translucent and unfeigned: "I was taken on originally for a year but Olivier said, 'Stay as long as you like, dear boy.' I'd like to be there when the new theater opens. At the moment we're trapped in an 800-seater theater [the Old Vic] of antique design. In the National Theater we shall have two auditoriums, with 1,100 and 750 seats each and an experimental studio seating 250.

So we shall be able to seat 2,100 a night." The company regards tours as part of its responsibility; it has already played in Berlin and Moscow, and plans to visit America in 1967. There are certain frustrations: "Clearly we would like more subsidy. But my chief complaint is the delay in the actual building of our theater. There is no real need why it should have taken so long. It is primarily because of the Government that it will not be up until 1970. Another complaint I have is that there is a tremendous shortage of first-rate directors. There are only about half a dozen. This tends to limit one as to the choice of plays. The best directors in England at the moment are Peter Brook, John Dexter, Peter Hall, William Gaskill and Tyrone Guthrie (although he is hardly ever in this country). We are having a sort of minor Elizabethan Age without Shakespeare. And we have the best young actors in the world." Tynan believes that the National Theater can give new young actors and writers a better deal than the commercial theater. "Instead of the usual four weeks' rehearsal, they'll get ten.

The members of the cast already know each other and don't have to spend the first week memorizing each other's names. The production will be watched over by Larry and the other directors and me." (Any comments Tynan may have are relayed through the director, though he can still sound like a critic and this actors resent). "As for royalties--over five years we can give an author the equivalent of a nine-month commercial run in the West End. Moreover, the writer will get far more residuals; we're quite happy for him to control American and film rights." Tynan switched from theater to film criticism when he joined Olivier (according to Peter Brook the one mistake he has made in his career so far, why shouldn't a man who has inveighed against convention all his life both criticize and create drama?). He admits ruefully that it is a social comedown: "You have more power as a dramatic critic. A film is always in the past tense--shot, cut, edited, canned, sold. A play is capable of change. You can suggest a change of actor, of director, of depth, of pace. A film will never be made again.

It's impermeable to suggestion with criticism is like sending a postcard to General Motors saying, 'I don't like your new model; please change it for me.' "On the other hand, it's very rare that a film is totally boring. So many talents have gone into it. If the script is visible the music may be all right. One thing I've tried to do is establish the claim of the film writer as the equal of the director. As for cinema acting, what you need is the ability to behave: to be quite self-consciously yourself with 100 lights and a camera crew staring at you. Humphrey Bogart was a great behaver--no less remarkable in his own way than Olivier." Tynan has few unfulfilled ambitions: "I'd like to write about jazz. I bought a trumpet once because I'd always wanted to play one. I went for lessons to a wonderful teacher but I found my face was the wrong shape. It should be flat; whereas I have a horse face with projecting lips. He kept saying, "Think with your lip." I said I'd learned to think with quite a different part of my body. After two weeks I could just play the scale in C major.

I still own the trumpet--it's been played in this room by Dizzy Gillespie." Nor does he feel competent to launch out alone as a director: "I wouldn't mind co-directing a play or film. I'm very confident of my opinions; not of my ability to persuade strangers to behave as I would like them to--which is directing." Tynan left America because he thought Broadway was "a contracting horizon. Having looked at the economics of it, I thought it was being written by, and addressed to, the middle classes. It will increasingly be dominated by light comedies and heavy musicals." He feels that for the first time England is the best country in which to live. "The East-West balance is now in London. Ten years ago it was Paris. All that was new in the novel, the theater, the film, happened there. But since de Gaulle there's a slight pull of defeatism. For the first time I've become a patriot. England now is an open, Socialist, sexually expanding society, where Socialism could also be fun. I don't think this country envies anybody." Tynan confesses that he is frightened to death by the passage of years.

"It's all right to be a lecher at 38 but at 50 it's ungraceful." His marriage to the American novelist Elaine Dundy (she wrote "The Dud Avocado" and "The Old Man and Me") was dissolved in 1964 after enduring tumultously for 14 years. They have one daughter, Tracy, now 13. He plans to marry Kathleen Halton, a young English journalist and says he has never been happier. "I like good food, a good hot climate, good plays and good sex. I agree with Cyril Connolly that happiness is traveling south in the summer with a girl you believe yourself to be in love with." He believes in the tangible, the concrete, the material--"things I can talk to, caress, or eat. I'm not interested in the metaphysical, the abstract. I'm interested in the here and now." Tynan's life is regular and modest. His secretary calls at 9:15 each morning and for half an hour he answers mail. He then goes to see a film, invariably eats lunch alone in an Indian restaurant and spends the afternoon and evening at the National Theater.

On weekends he writes for American magazines; he has a major contract with Playboy. He is not a rich man. He has a bank overdraft of ?2,000. His relaxation is contriving and playing intricate word or guessing games. This chimes with his theory that drama, politics, law, cinema are all in essence games with certain rules and a fixed area of combat. He drinks German white wines and gin and ginger ale in moderation. He recently had a medical check-up and was told by his doctor that he had the heart of an undergraduate ("Maybe the mind, too," Tynan commented ruefully). He knows nobody today from Birmingham, sees some of his old Oxford friends ("They're in charge") but says the university means nothing to him now except for what he learned from C.S. Lewis. It was Lewis, the articulate and scholarly Christian, who, Tynan confessed once, had brought him to the gates of belief--but not through them. "I hope I never need to believe in God. It would be an awful confession of failure." Godfrey Smith is editor of the magazine section of The Sunday Times, London.

He has published four novels, most recently a satire on commercial television called "The Network.' Tynan at the Theater "Look Back in Anger," by John Osborne--"I agree that 'Look Back in Anger' is likely to remain a minority taste. What matters, however, is the size of the minority. I estimate it at roughly 6,733,000, which is the number of people in this country between the ages of 20 and 30. And this figure will doubtless be swelled by refugees from other age groups who are curious to know precisely what the contemporary young pup is thinking and feeling. I doubt if I could love anyone who did not wish to see 'Look Back in Anger.' It is the best young play of its decade." "The Quare Fellow," by Brendan Behan--"The English hoard words like misers; the Irish spend them like sailors; and in Brendan Behan's tremendous new play, language is out on a spree, ribald, dauntless, and spoiling for a fight. In itself, of course, this is scarcely amazing.

It is Ireland's sacred duty to send over, every few years, a playwright to save the English theater from inarticulate glumness." "Under Milk Wood," by Dylan Thomas--"The manic riot of Thomas's prose outdoes even the young O'Casey. He conscripts metaphors, rapes the dictionary, and builds a verbal bawdyhouse where words mate and couple on the wing like swifts. Nouns dress up, quite unself-consciously, as verbs, sometimes balancing three-tiered epithets on their heads and often alliterating to boot. Taproom baroque? However we sum up the play's style, it lights up the sky as nothing has since 'Juno.'" "Nude with Violin," by Noel Coward--When Sir John Gielgud appears in modern dress on the London stage for only the second time since the late nineteen-forties, selecting as his vehicle Noel Coward's 'Nude with Violin,' one's expectations are naturally low.

Sir John never acts seriously in modern dress; it is the lounging attire in which he relaxes between classical bookings, and his present performance as a simpering valet is an act of boyish mischief, carried out with extreme elegance and the general aspect of a tight, smart, walking umbrella." "The Demolition Expert," by Bernard Shaw--"He was the badman of letters. Though he took great pains to command respect, he took none at all to inspire affection.... But does he ever move us? Only once, I think: with the speech in which St. Joan reminds herself that 'God is alone.' That came from Shaw's heart and goes straight to ours. Otherwise, if Chaucer is the father of English literature, Shaw is the spinster aunt. By this I do not mean to imply that he was sexless...It is only in his writing that the aunt in him rises up, full of warnings, wagged fingers, and brandished umbrellas...Shaw was unique.

An Irish aunt so gorgeously drunk with wit is something English literature will never see again." "Amedee," by Eugene Ionesco--"Its meaning is always there, staring at us through the veil of glittering farce that disguises it; and such is Ionesco's mastery that we are most aware of it when our laughter is loudest. This, the best of his plays that I have seen, is also the neatest proof that his philosophy of despair is pure humbug.

A man who triumphantly succeeds in communicating his belief that it is impossible to communicate anything is in the grip, I cannot help thinking, of a considerable logical error." Tynan Sounds Off Greta Garbo--"What, when drunk, one sees in other women, one sees in Garbo sober." Kirk Douglas--"He talks through a grinning rictus of bared and gritted teeth, like a demented ventriloquist." Mary McCarthy--"I have often thought that her writing had every masculine virtue except femininity." "The Visit"--The vengeful hag is played by Ingrid Bergman, which is like casting Eleanor Roosevelt as Lizzie Borden." "The Hallelujah Trail"--"Whoever heard of an anecdote with an intermission?" "Mister Moses"--"Like most films, it stars Carroll Baker. The running time is 115 minutes. The walking out time is much earlier.

The weather is excellent throughout." Marlene Dietrich--"She has sex but of no particular gender." Anthony Quinn--"He always acts as if he were wearing a suit for the first time." Gertrude Lawrence--"Her graciousness has grown stifling, her archness I find almost ducal, and she distracts me by her manual gestures toward her face, as if she were forever brushing cobwebs off her nose." Critics--"A critic is a man who knows the way but can't drive the car." Godfrey Smith is editor of the magazine section of The Sunday Times, London. He has published four novels, most recently a satire on commercial television called "The Network." Greta Garbo - Wikiquote Greta Garbo Jump to: navigation , search I never said, "I want to be alone." I only said, "I want to be let alone! There is all the difference. Greta Garbo ( September 18 , 1905 – April 15 , 1990 ), born Greta Lovisa Gustafsson, was a Swedish born actress and Hollywood icon.

Contents Quotes[ edit ] I never said, "I want to be alone." I only said, "I want to be let alone! There is all the difference. Quoted in John Bainbridge, Garbo (1955) As the Russian ballerina Grusinskaya in Grand Hotel (1932), she had said "I want to be alone." These words had become associated with Garbo herself in the public imagination. I am bewildered by the thousands of strange people who write me letters. They do not know me. Why do they do that? Screen Secrets: Greta Garbo Breaks her Silence (1928) Misattributed[ edit ] I t'ank I go home. Allegedly said on a movie set, after a director had filmed repeated takes of Garbo jumping into icy cold water, and wanted to film yet another take. Reported Paul F. Boller, John George, They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, and Misleading Attributions (1990), p. 30-31. About Greta Garbo[ edit ] Every man's harmless fantasy mistress.

By being worshiped by the entire world she gave you the feeling that if your imagination had to sin, it can at least congratulate itself on its impeccable taste. Her instinct, her mastery over the machine, was pure witchcraft. I cannot analyze this woman's acting. I only know that no one else so effectively worked in front of a camera. Bette Davis , in The Lonely Life : An Autobiography‎ (1962), p. 116 She is the most miraculous blend of personality and sheer dramatic talent that the screen has ever known and her presence in The Painted Veil immediately makes it one of the season's cinema events. Andre Sennwald, in The New York Times (1934), as quoted in The Films of Greta Garbo (1963) by Michael Conway, Dion McGregor and Mark Ricci, p. 126 You're the purple light of a summer night in Spain. You're the National Gallery; you're Garbo's Salary; you're cellophane!

Greta Garbo, 84, Screen Icon Who Fled Her Stardom, Dies Greta Garbo, 84, Screen Icon Who Fled Her Stardom, Dies By THE NEW YORK TIMES Greta Garbo, the enigmatic and elusive star of some of Hollywood's most memorable romantic movies of the 1930's and a 50-year focus of curiosity and myth, died yesterday at New York Hospital in Manhattan. She was 84 years old. A hospital spokesman, Andrew Banoff, saying he was respecting the wishes of the family, provided no details of her death, and said services would be private. The Swedish-born actress had a classic beauty and a natural talent for conveying deep emotions before a camera. Her performances in such classics as ''Anna Christie,'' ''Grand Hotel,'' ''Queen Christina,'' ''Anna Karenina,'' ''Camille'' and ''Ninotchka'' were an arresting mix of urbaneness and vulnerability, with a glint of mockery. The Screen's Great Sufferer The finest element in a Garbo film was Garbo. She invariably played a disillusioned woman of the world who falls hopelessly and giddily in love.

Tragedy is often imminent, and her tarnished-lady roles usually required her to die or otherwise give up her lover. No one could suffer like Garbo. Mysterious and aloof, she appealed to both men and women, and she exerted a major influence on women's fashions, hair styles and makeup. On screen and off, she was a remote figure of loveliness. Garbo's career spanned only 19 years. In 1941, at the age of 36, she made the last of her 27 movies, a slight comedy called ''Two Faced Woman.'' She went into what was to be temporary retirement, but she never returned to the screen. Yet generations later, her best movies were shown on television, in sold-out retrospectives and in revival houses, and she remained one of the greatest screen actresses, evergreen, eternally young. In the 1930's she was called ''the screen's first lady,'' the standard against whom others were judged.

Andre Sennwald wrote in The New York Times that she was ''the most miraculous blend of personality the screen has ever seen.'' Alistair Cooke termed her ''every man's fantasy mistress.'' The French called her ''La Divine.'' And Kenneth Tynan concluded, ''What when drunk one sees in other women, one sees in Garbo sober.'' For more than half a century, the actress remained an enigma, ''the Swedish sphinx,'' because of her deep fear of reporters and other strangers and her insistence on guarding her privacy. Ironically, in seeking to avoid publicity, she became one of the most publicized women in the world. Her penchant for privacy broke all of Hollywood's rules, said her biographer, John Bainbridge. Except at the start of her career, he wrote in ''Garbo,'' she ''granted no interviews, signed no autographs, attended no premieres, answered no fan mail.'' A declaration often attributed to her was, ''I want to be alone.'' Actually she said, ''I want to be let alone.'' Her screen image was exotic and inscrutable, while her private life was simple, even mundane.

In a rare statement to reporters she acknowledged, ''I feel able to express myself only through my roles, not in words, and that is why I try to avoid talking to the press.'' Garbo's aloofness frustrated the press, which published thousands of photographs of her frantically clutching a drooping hat over her face as she shopped or raced for a train, ship or plane. Speculations About Her Escorts Her presumed love affairs - she was never known to have married - were the subject of voluminous gossip and speculation. Over the decades her frequent escorts included the actor John Gilbert; the conductor Leopold Stokowski; the nutrition theorist Gayelord Hauser; Baron Erich Goldschmidt-Rothschild, an art connoisseur, and George Schlee, a figure in haute couture. Garbo's movies earned her more than $3 million, a record at a time of low income taxes, and her frugality and astute investments, particularly in Manhattan real estate, increased her wealth. Her life had begun in virtual poverty. Greta Lovisa Gustafsson was born in Stockholm on Sept. 18, 1905, the daughter of Karl Alfred and Anna Lovisa Gustafsson.

Her father was an unskilled laborer of peasant stock who was often out of work. The family lived in a shabby district of Stockholm, and Greta had to leave school at the age of 13 to help care for her seriously ill father. Every week she took him to a charity clinic, where they had to wait hours for his treatment. She vowed to build her life so she would never be financially dependent. Her father died when she was 14 and she had to go to work, first as a latherer in a barber shop and then as a salesclerk in a department store. Her beauty soon gained her a role in a short film sponsored by the store, a part in a publicity short for a bakery and then a leading role as a frolicking bathing beauty in a slapstick feature, ''Peter the Tramp.'' She won a two-year scholarship to Stockholm's Royal Dramatic Theater Academy, where she was discovered by Mauritz Stiller, a famous, worldly and flamboyant director. He and Victor Seastrom were the leaders of the golden age of Swedish silent movies. The 40-year-old Mr. Stiller took absolute command of the professional and private life of the 17-year-old novice.

He named her Garbo and cast her as the ingenue in his film epic of Selma Lagerlof's novel ''Saga of Gosta Berling.'' Doubts in Sweden, A Hit in Berlin The four-hour movie drew mixed notices in Stockholm, but a three-hour version was a hit in Berlin, where reviewers found Garbo ''a soul-revealing Nordic princess.'' Her next role was as a poor prospective prostitute in ''Streets of Sorrow,'' directed by G. W. Pabst. Louis B. Mayer, the production chief of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, saw ''Gosta Berling'' in Berlin and offered Mr. Stiller a contract. He accepted on condition that his plump protegee also be hired. Mr. Mayer agreed reluctantly, muttering, ''In America, men don't like fat women.'' The first of Garbo's 24 Hollywood movies, all made for M-G-M, was ''The Torrent,'' a 1926 melodrama starring the Latin lover Ricardo Cortez. The daily rushes revealed the young actress's extraordinary film-acting talent, and her salary was raised before the movie was released.

As soon as a camera began rolling, the awkward girl with the moody eyes and large hands suddenly and charismatically sprang to life. Now slimmer and only 20, she played a seductive Spanish peasant who becomes an opera star. She was an overnight sensation. Mr. Stiller, still smarting from being barred from directing ''The Torrent,'' began directing her in ''The Temptress,'' a variation of ''The Torrent'' starring another Latin, Antonio Moreno. The director had repeated arguments with M-G-M executives and was abruptly dismissed in mid-shooting. He went to Paramount Pictures, but soon also antagonized executives there, and they let him go. Unable to hold a job in Hollywood, he returned to Sweden in 1928. Within a year, he died of several ailments at the age of 45. His death devastated Garbo, who was said to feel deep guilt for many years for not returning to Sweden to see him. His dynamic personality set the pattern for her later lovers. A Movie Succeeds And Rumors Fly Her third Hollywood role was a heartless adulteress in ''Flesh and the Devil,'' co-starring John Gilbert, the epitome of silent-movie masculinity.

Their love scenes, peppered with suggestive gestures and language, were electrifying. Reports of a Garbo-Gilbert romance swept the country, and their passionate on-screen lovemaking was regarded as a reflection of their off-screen lives. The gossip fueled the movie's triumph. M-G-M then co-starred the couple in ''Love,'' a 1927 modern-dress version of Tolstoy's ''Anna Karenina,'' another huge success. In only two years, Garbo became a superstar. By shrewd negotiating, threatening to return to Sweden and staging a strike, she also won unheard-of raises. In only three years, her weekly salary soared from $350 to $5,000, and six years later she won a record $270,000 per movie. She made seven more silent films in two years, ''The Divine Woman,'' portraying Sarah Bernhardt; ''The Mysterious Lady''; ''A Woman of Affairs,'' which was adapted from the novel ''The Green Hat'' by Michael Arlen; ''Wild Orchids''; ''The Single Standard,'' and ''The Kiss.'' All made money despite the new dominance of sound movies.

Off screen, there were continuing rumors of a Garbo-Gilbert love affair, with photographers invariably dogging them. There was gossip about an abortive elopement and reports of a wedding ceremony at which she failed to appear. At any rate, apparently weary of the actor's overbearing bravado, she ended the relationship in 1929. Talkies were destroying the careers of many Europeans, and M-G-M delayed Garbo's sound debut more than two years. She was astutely presented in an adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's ''Anna Christie,'' where her accent was appropriate. The publicity slogan was simply: ''Garbo Talks!'' Her speech was heavily accented and husky, but this new dimension of the Swedish enigma gave her even greater stature, and the movie played to packed houses across the country. Her opening line of dialogue was widely quoted and became classic:.

She wearily enters a waterfront saloon and orders the bartender to ''Gimme a visky with chincher ale on the side and don't be stingy, baby.'' Garbo's other early sound movies included ''Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise'' (1931), co-starring Clark Gable; ''Mata Hari'' (1932), with Ramon Novarro, and a version of Luigi Pirandello's mystical play ''As You Desire Me'' (1932), co-starring Melvyn Douglas, in which she adroitly portrayed an amnesiac. An adaptation of Vicki Baum's novel ''Grand Hotel'' featured four other stars John and Lionel Barrymore, Joan Crawford and Wallace Beery but Garbo, as a fading ballerina, stole the movie. The film, directed by Edmund Goulding, won an Academy Award as the best picture of 1932. M-G-M honored Garbo's distaste for publicity and her insistence that all visitors be barred from her sets. When close-ups were shot, black screens were placed around Garbo and the camera.

Asked why she objected to visitors, she said: ''When people are watching, I'm just a woman making faces for the camera. It destroys the illusion.'' Questioned about the screens, she said, ''If I am by myself, my face will do things I cannot do with it otherwise.'' Old Co-star Tries To Regain Career Despite these demands, her directors and other associates respected her thorough professionalism and lack of temperament and admired her graciousness. ''Queen Christina'' (1933) gave Garbo a long-sought chance to portray the eccentric 17th-century Swedish monarch. She co-starred with Mr. Gilbert in an effort to bolster his sagging career. Sound had revealed his thin voice, totally inadequate for his image of a dashing lover. He did well in ''Queen Christina,'' but his career continued to wither. He drank heavily, and died of a heart attack in 1936 at the age of 41. The largely fictional ''Queen Christina'' provided Garbo with one of her most radiant roles. The tragic film ended with an enormous five-and-a-half-second-long close-up of her face as she stood on the prow of a ship.

The queen has given up her throne for her lover, who is now dead. She is taking his body back to Spain and then faces a voyage to nowhere. Her breathtaking and mystical expression has often been likened to that of the Mona Lisa. Rouben Mamoulian, who directed, told her the audience must use its imagination to interpret her thoughts, and instructed her ''to make your face a mask, to think and feel nothing.'' Recalling the movie after 50 years, Mr. Mamoulian revealed in a 1983 interview that Garbo had often directed herself. ''When we got to the first intimate scene, she asked me to leave the set.'' he said. ''I asked her why. She said, 'During these scenes I allow only the cameraman and lighting man on the set. The director goes out for a coffee or a milkshake.' I replied, 'When I'm directing a movie, I don't go out for a milkshake.' Reluctantly, she agreed I could stay.'' Garbo's title roles in ''Anna Karenina,'' with Fredric March, and an adaptation of Alexandre Dumas fils's ''Camille,'' co-starring a youthful Robert Taylor, were two of her finest performances.

They won her the New York Film Critics Awards for best actress in 1935 and 1936. She never received an Oscar for best actress. But in 1955 the motion picture academy sought to make amends by awarding her a special Oscar for ''a series of luminous and unforgettable performances.'' Comedy Is Tried To Reclaim Fans By the late 1930's Garbo's box-office appeal was declining, and M-G-M's solution was to have her do her first comedy. The vehicle was ''Ninotchka,'' a brilliant satire written by Billy Wilder, Charles Brackett and Walter Reisch and directed by Ernst Lubitsch. Garbo superbly played a humorless, self-absorbed Soviet envoy who is humanized by Paris and the urbane Melvyn Douglas. The slogan for the 1939 movie read, ''Garbo Laughs.'' Her second comedy was ''Two Faced Woman,'' a frivolous, heartless farce and her only unsuccessful movie. Meanwhile, the European market, which provided the major income from her pictures, was largely cut off by World War II, and M-G-M refused to meet her salary demands. She announced her retirement.

During the war, Garbo was criticized for not aiding the Allies. But in 1976, in a book titled ''A Man Called Intrepid: The Secret War,'' William Stevenson disclosed that she had helped Britain by identifying high-level Nazi sympathizers in Stockholm and by providing introductions and carrying messages for British agents. Garbo hoped to return to movies after the war. There were repeated reports over two decades of projects that were to include her, but, for various reasons, none ever materialized. In later years, Garbo called herself ''a wanderer'' and traveled often to Switzerland, the French Riviera and Italy, though she became an American citizen in 1951. For more than 40 years her home base was a Manhattan apartment on East 52d Street, overlooking the East River. She was as secretive about her relatives as about herself, and the names of her survivors could not immediately be learned. Usually alone, Garbo regularly strolled, shopped and browsed in the East 50's and 60's, where New Yorkers savored fleeting glimpses of her haunting face. She wore fashionable but simple outfits, large hats and flat shoes and almost no makeup.

The occasional descriptions of her offered by friends suggest she had a childlike innocence and was selfish and self-absorbed. They deplored the aimlessness of her life. But another friend, Jane Gunther, said, ''She has a poetic magic, so difficult to describe, and all one knows is that one wants this in one's life.'' Assaying Garbo's art and life, John Bainbridge offered this tribute: ''She did nothing that was second-rate. She had dignity and nobility. Like so many great actresses, she may never have possessed a particle of intellectual power, but she had genius before the camera because she was guided by a secret, sublime, infallible instinct to do the right thing in the right way. So unerring was her instinct that it produced the illusion of a most subtle intelligence.'' The Films Before the Solitude These are Greta Garbo's most important films. Her first talkie was ''Anna Christie.'' The Legend of Gosta Berling 1924 The Street of Sorrow 1925 Flesh and the Devil 1927 Love 1927

Question: About whom did Kenneth Tynan say, "What one sees in other women drunk, one sees in... sober?"
Answer: Greta Garbo